Archives from 4th September 2004 to 17th November 2004
(Wednesday 17th November)Well, it looks like my car is finally going :(
Eventually settling for a reasonable offer from a used car dealer (what I wanted in the first place and would have saved over £100 in advertising), I'll be driving it for the last time tomorrow. I just hope it goes to someone who will look after it and get a few more years of happy driving out of it. Still, that's nothing compared to John's loss tomorrow - his much loved cat, still only 3½, suffering from some rare disease which that particular pedigree seem to be prone to. I can empathise, having had Monty run over at 14 months and Thomas having to be put down with feline AIDS. In fact, Thomas was the inspiration for this site - just getting into computers at the time, I decided to write a webpage in his memory and nearly 2 years later this is the result!
I'm hopping mad at having collected a £120 fine and 6 points on my licence within an hour - on the way to and from a lunch break at work, rushing home as usual! Only doing 40mph, on a good wide stretch of road, which is downhill, it's hard not to exceed the speed limit. The fact that the police choose to hide behind trees with mobile cameras at that particular location is proof in my own mind that since they painted the static ones yellow, they're presumably now a bit short of revenue. I thought the general opinion was that obvious cameras controlled speed just as effectively as hidden ones! (In fact, followed without noticing it, a few days ago, I realised with some horror that one of these "caught on camera" vans had been behind me for some time, so I'm busy praying that's not soon going to be 9 points on my licence!
Problems with this PC again - had to restore from an image as for the 4th time I booted up to be presented with "missing NTLDR file". Maxtor tests found no physical fault with the drive, but even so, after the second time this happened I changed the two physical drives round and put the Windows partition on the newer drive. I've also got laptop problems as I can't remember my root admin password for mandrake and my first attempt to reset it failed. However, time, as usual is not on my side. I may decide to format the laptop and make the windows partition rather larger than the linux one as I hadn't forseen how much I would still need XP on it.
(Tuesday 9th November)Internet Explorer is too good at interpreting bad HTML and working out what you meant to write. Most people turn off those irritating debugging and script notifying errors (how many people debug javascript anyway, particularly when it isn't even their site, merely one they happen to have clicked on?) Thanks Row, for pointing out in two minutes what I'd puzzled over most of last night!
I'm so happy for Gus, and hope he enjoys the well deserved solitude :)) What a sensible woman Pao is!
(Monday 8th November)We enjoyed going down to the Moor to set off large fireworks on bonfire night this year, but it brought memories flooding back of November 5th, bonfire night, 12 months ago to the day. Never will I forget that heart stopping moment, that knock on the door while I was half dressed, getting organised to deliver the annual accounts to the AGM of the Gosforth Golf Club Ladies Section. The shock of realising that I was powerless to stop the inexorably planned events from taking place, no matter how inconvenient or how much I protested! I'll always recall the background banging and whistling of fireworks going off everywhere, as I was eventually driven home, where in a state of shock, I found myself phoning Michael from Safeway, having jumped in the car to get petrol for some strange reason.
What is the point of a Dress Down Friday? Surely if smart business dress is important in principle, it's important on every day of the week ?!?
(Monday 1st November)Changed the photo for one taken in Oxford earlier this year (Louise's birthday). A temporary measure until I find something more suitable but it's late and I suddenly realised it was ages since I updated this site. Enjoyed a few days away at the bungalow, including a walk from Kirk Yetholm (unfortunately in pouring rain, a few holes of golf and a nice swim in the sea amid huge breakers and a very high tide. Otherwise I caught up on several week's lack of sleep! Went shopping today and came back with some display fireworks we're going to have to go down to the moor to set off, as spectators are apparently supposed to be at least 25 metres away!
(Saturday 23rd October)It was nice to get a message from Yves again, which prompted me to edit the guestbook's appearance (and get rid of some of the more pointless posts).
PCA give out some incredibly duff advice! Reading through the September problem page (I'm always several months behind!), I came across a letter from someone who had followed the tip about creating a .reg file to store and automatically implement registry hacks. They were getting the error message "Cannot import file: the specified file is not a registry script etc etc". Well, that's happened to me too, and the problem has NOT been failing to select "all files" under "save as type" when creating tweaks.reg (if the guy couldn't even get a simple thing like that right, he's hardly likely to have been making multiple edits to the registry in the first place). More probably, one or more of his tweaks hasn't been written correctly - as I discovered when I tried mine one by one.
Like their excellent advice on dealing with the blaster worm, which involved going to services.msc, finding Remote Procedure Call and changing the way XP handled its response if the service failed, ie changing "restart the computer" to "restart the service". By the time you'd done all that, the chances are your PC would have shut down (especially as it didn't even work). I notice the September edition printed a letter from someone pointing out what I'd learnt and been dying to tell them, ever since gus and his evil jpeg tricks had put me in the same situation. TYPING "SHUTDOWN -A" IS A LOT EASIER AND 10 TIMES QUICKER!
(Saturday 16th October)I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks - only four days at work! Everything is organised for Oxford except the packing ..... coach tickets booked, welcome email from British Airways, my car booked into the long stay car park at Newcastle Airport. In spare moments I'm planning how to spend the two days and one evening with Louise and what to wear for formal hall.
Email clients continue to irritate me ... in an effort to find an alternative to AOL Communicator which seems to need refreshing to retrieve mail at the moment, I switched to Outlook. However, trying to separate mail from two different domain accounts hasn't been very successful - no matter what message rules I set, incoming mail is duplicated in each folder (and Inbox) for the yahoo account. Sent mail is slightly better, ****@moiraatkinson will go from the **** folder while $$$$@moiraatkinson uses the $$$$ folder (for example). A written email still takes the address of whichever account I set as default though, which is a nuisence. This works better with AOL Communicator, although incoming and outgoing mail still copies to both accounts - and for both Outlook and Communicator, the domain addresses assigned to the two AOL accounts still go out as sent mail from address@aol.com rather than domainaddress@moiraatkinson.co.uk.
(Tuesday 11th October)IM clients v IRC .... as I sit here having achieved nothing very much tonight, at a time when I really ought to be in bed, I sometimes wish MSN would go down more often (and that AIM would follow suit). What is it with some people, that they think you have nothing better to do than be interrupted every 5 minutes to drop everything and chat? People who are used to IRC generally know how to achieve that fine balance between convenience and intrusiveness. On IRC there are no awkward pauses, no uncomfortable silences .... it is perfectly acceptable to message someone and 3 hours later get a response, because that's the nature of the internet. But there are some people who can't seem to understand that you might not always be in a position to respond to their (usually non urgent) messages instantly. "Why are you ignoring me???" "What was wrong yesterday? I was so worried when I didn't get a reply!!" are two typical comments I've had time and time again. Instant messaging is a little bit like a mobile phone - it can be incredibly useful, but also highly irritating!
(Monday 11th October)This is a really quick update because this blog is beginning to give the impression of having been abandoned ..... my new job is sucking up so much of my time that I'm beginning to feel really stressed just trying to keep everything else going. I've spent the weekend doing what I feel like I've been doing all month - reinstalling Windows. Both my desktop PCs have contrived to need new installs; at least mine restored from an image (although this happened twice and as it was an early image, still needed loads of work) and Emily and Philip's has had a new mobo fitted which (as I expected) Windows just didn't like. Still, the benefits are there now it's done. Memory swapped from this PC can finally run at its true speed of 333mhz and the two sticks can be accessed simultaneously. The motherboard has been described on OCUK forums as "an overclocker's dream" and the humble Duron 1.67 processor is now running nicely with a very high FSB and lower multiplier, thanks to Michael. Emily is pleased with the noticeable increase in speed when she plays Sims 2!
(Sunday 26th September)Find out if your computer is vulnerable to the latest jpeg exploit by clicking here. This example of the exploit will just cause an unprotected system to crash and doesn't contain any evil code. However, it can be rather disconcerting to find your computer shutting down, but be reassured, it happens 3 times and that's it! Quickly typing Start > Run > shutdown -a when the timer begins the 30 second countdown will also halt the forced close. If nothing else, if your system is unpatched, it's a sobering lesson in the dangers that are out there. However, anyone who has installed SP2, and updated Windows XP/Office with the latest M$ patches, should be OK.
As I was waiting to pay for some shampoo at lunchtime on Friday, there was a woman ahead of me trying to buy some painkillers for her headache. Because the pharmacist was at lunch, the strongest tablets she could buy were pure paracetamol, rather than the co-codamol she'd asked for. Which got me thinking what a skewed set of values we now have. I can totally appreciate the situation from the chemist's point of view, as the increase in spurious compensation claims have forced these kind of nanny measures on us, but this woman could have gone next door and bought a packet of cigarettes, or a bottle of whisky - both more potentially harmful than the 8mg of codeine phosphate per tablet she was trying to purchase. In fact, the paracetamol the chemist was willing to sell her are far more dangerous in overdose than the codeine, in that if she'd taken too many co-codamol, the paracetamol would have reached LD50 levels way before the codeine phos! Society has a flawed view of "drug abuse" and would do better to tackle the cigarette smoking and binge drinking it seems to condone, than display blind panic regarding the miniscule amount of mood elevating chemicals contained in OTT medicines.
Continued thanks to Krusty for the reliable efficient hosting of this site. The server never goes down, Krusty makes no demands whatsoever and just carries on allowing me to host this blog in his efficient, background way. He also hosts my domain email. All this from someone I've never even met but only know from an irc channel and forum!
(Saturday 25th September)Well, this hasn't been the easiest last few weeks, but there have been some positive times, and a few people who have risen in my estimation for their support (more so as it was often unexpected). Carl and Wendy for example, for having the intelligence to see through what the majority accepted as accurate goings on in #adsl.
Another unintended late night, and instead of the much hoped for lie in tomorrow, I'm having to get up at half past 6 to play golf. I'm going to leave the Windows partition to take a backup image of my now back to normal C drive running overnight - and I hope I make a more intelligent job of it than I did with the defrag last night! Deciding to do the job properly, I shut down every possible process and disabled the paging file. It wasn't until this morning that I realised the paging file isn't even on the C drive! I'm too sleep deprived I think ...... :(
(Sunday 19th September)3 years to the day .... glad The Musical did well at the fringe, Ashley! If anyone is interested in buying a 5 year old Daewoo Lanos, FSH, new air con, good condition, 56,000 miles, email me! Pictures here and here.
Imaging the windows partition shortly after a new install has turned out to be the best thing I ever did. Although I hate reinstalling Windows, this was a lot less painful, as it only involved putting a very basic copy of XP on the C drive and then installing Acronis which was then used to reinstate an image of the hard drive taken after my last install, when everything was set up how I wanted it, but hadn't had time to get bloated. Of course there had been changes and there was still a lot to sort out - like Service Pack 2. And despite, as luck would have it, taking a CD backup of My Documents a day or two before Windows reported a missing NTLDR file, there was the inevitable loss of some data I would rather have kept. Fortunately all my programs are both backed up on another drive and stored on a separate computer, so it was easy to run through the list of zipped archives to find what hadn't been installed when the image was taken.
As soon as I'm sure I have everything back the way I want it, I am definitely taking another image! And talking of images, I must get round to replacing the current photo of myself which was taken last year and I'm getting rather bored with!
Lastly, it's hard to comprehend the depths some people will stoop to .... the internet as a whole not only indulges all kinds of weirdos and lowlife, but seemingly rejoices in their presence in IRC channels and on forums. Even by these standards, however, certain people manage to stand out! Fortunately the net is a big place and it's easy to find other, nicer fish in the sea and have nothing to do with the unbelievable scum you might have the misfortune to cross paths with.
(Thursday 9th September)Well, no caught mouse :/ And a nasty notice on my car after visiting the Freeman hospital, when I had no option but to park on a double yellow line. What is the point of threatening to clamp a car when it is blindingly obvious there is just nowhere to park? Taking unpaid time off work for a consultant's appointment, I'm not about to miss it because I spend 2 hours driving round the car park trying to find somewhere to put the car. They don't even have a queueing system, so the most aggressive driver gets the next available space.
Some photos of my recent trip to Dublin with Anne - click here.
(Tuesday 7th September)The mousetrap arrived and it is a joke! It claims to hold 4 mice, but even small rodents would have to line up like sardines in a tin to fit inside, and this mouse (rat?) is just about the size of the box, and that's not taking account of the mechanisms inside which reduce space even further. How the manufacturers think that something as large as this is going to manage to even squeeze through the opening is beyone me! Never mind, I'll give it a try, but I do NOT expect to find our mouse in it tomorrow morning.
(Monday 6th September)Spent the evening fitting a decent graphics card (and powerful PSU) to Emily's PC ready for Sims 2, due out later this month. The benchmarking tests were interesting .... and proved that the effort to fit her old graphics card in this PC were maybe not noticeable for my everyday use, but an improvement on the onboard graphics. Also investigated the rather high temperatures being reported here and came to the definite conclusion that the BIOS was misreading them. The system is perfectly stable and to get a reported CPU temp of 48° when the system was booted up after being switched off for a good 20 minutes, is ridiculous! Trouble is, it doesn't stop the BIOS shrieking out a warning if it goes over 70°, nor would it prevent the system inconveniently shutting down if it was to go to what it thought was a much higher temperature. Thank goodness for a controllable fan which can be turned up if necessary!
Also many thanks to Michael for offering his hardware expertise, which ensured tonight was enjoyable and efficient, rather than a frustrating, lengthy evening!
Started a new job today (again!). It's rather nice not to be working shifts, now that I'll be starting two more evening classes later this month. It's handy enough to catch a bus in the mornings instead of taking the car, and the journey takes about 10 minutes. It's a lovely relaxed environment - what a change! The only internet rules are to surf the net and check personal mail during lunch time, rather than when you're meant to be working, which is totally fair enough.
(Saturday 4th September)Dublin was great! More on this later when I sort out some photos ...... for an update on the mouse, click here .
To read more archive weblogs, click here which will take you to the previous archive, which in turn contains a link to the one before that.
